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Source section: Section 1 - Introduction to Green Buildings and Communities PDF page: 12 Guide page: 5 OCR quality: high (438 words)
OCR Text
The study concluded that the federal government’s green buildings outperform national averages in all measured performance areas—energy, operating costs, water use, occupant satisfaction, and carbon emissions. The agency attributed this performance to a fully integrated approach to sustainable design that addressed environmental, financial, and occupant satisfaction issues. This higher performance will last throughout a building’s lifetime if the facility is also operated and maintained for sustainability. Sustainability is not a one-time treatment or product. Instead, green building is a process that applies to buildings, their sites, their interiors, their operations, and the communities in which they are situated. The process of green building flows throughout the entire life-cycle of a project, beginning at the inception of a project idea and continuing seamlessly until the project reaches the end ofits life and its parts are recycled or reused. In this guide, the term green building encompasses planning, design, construction, operations, and ultimately end-of-life recycling or renewal of structures. Green building pursues solutions that represent ahealthy and dynamic balance between environmental, social, and economic benefits. Sustainability and “green,” often used interchangeably, are about more than just reducing environmental impacts. Sustainability means creating places that are environmentally responsible, healthful, just, equitable, and profitable. Greening the built environment means looking holistically at natural, human, and economic systems and finding solutions that support quality of life for all. Triple bottom line is also often used to refer to the concept of sustainability. The term was coined by John Elkington, cofounder of the business consultancy SustainAbility, in his 1998 book Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business. First applied to socially responsible business, the term can characterize all kinds of projects in the built environment. The triple bottom line concept incorporates a long-term view for assessing potential effects and best practices for three kinds of resources:
- PEOPLE (SOCIAL CAPITAL). All the costs and benefits to the people who design, construct, live in, work in, and constitute the local community and are influenced, directly or indirectly, by a project
- PLANET (NATURAL CAPITAL). All the costs and benefits of a project on the natural environment, locally and globally
- PROFIT (ECONOMIC CAPITAL). All the economic costs and benefits of a project for all the stakeholders (not just the project owner) The goal of the triple bottom line, in terms of the built environment, is to ensure that buildings and communities create value for all stakeholders, not just a restricted few. For example, an energy-efficient building that saves the owners money but makes the occupants sick is not sustainable, nor is a material that has a small carbon footprint but was made in a sweatshop, nor is an eco-resort that displaces threatened species or local people. z 2 o Ww un 5